What's up with Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave? In a piece called "Looking for the Exit", he makes it sound as if we've lost the war in Iraq, and the only question about getting out is not if, but when:

If it wasn't a quagmire, it was certainly quagmiry. And the first prominent retired general to break ranks with President Bush's Iraq war policy was a Republican who once headed the National Security Agency and also served as a deputy national security adviser. Gen. William E. Odom, a fluent Russian speaker who teaches at Georgetown and Yale universities, told the Wall Street Journal's John Harwood staying the course in Iraq is untenable.

It was hard to disagree with Gen. Odom's description of Mr. Bush's vision of reordering the Middle East by building a democracy in Iraq as a pipedream. His prescription: Remove U.S. forces "from that shattered country as rapidly as possible."

Gen. Odom says bluntly, "we have failed," and "the issue is how high a price we're going to pay — less by getting out sooner, or more by getting out later."

De Borchgrave is also in touch with the pulse of the Arab street:

Arab opinion has been inflamed to the point where Palestine and Iraq are now two fronts in the war against what Charles de Gaulle used to call "the Anglo-Saxons." Osama bin Laden is probably thinking he's some kind of strategic genius.

In Iraq, quite apart from Fallujah and Najaf, the U.S. occupation, according to the latest Gallup polls, has turned most of the population against America. In Baghdad, only 13 percent now believe the invasion and regime change it accomplished were morally justifiable. Only one-third of Iraqis believe the occupation is doing more good than harm and a majority favor an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal while conceding this could put them in greater danger. Gen. Odom presumably has his finger on the same pulse.

Has anyone checked to see whether Reverend Moon was on the Saddam voucher payroll?

(Moon's plans for the U.N. are not really a secret.)

UPDATE: Lest anyone dismiss de Borchgrave as a lone voice, Bruce Fein (also writing in the Times) is thinking along similar lines.

As was said of Napoleon's assassination of the Duc d'Enghein, President George W. Bush's inanely conducted effort to summon a secular democratic Iraq into being is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

His latest follies unwittingly aid the enemy. The president should publicly confess his monumental miscalculations over post-Saddam Iraq, arrange for an orderly withdrawal of America's military presence, and accept the inescapable Iraqi convulsions that will follow as less horrific than would be additional aimless American casualties.

....[I]t's very, very important that we get this right. My concern is that if we don't, we'll have a much bigger war on our hands, in which we'll be forced to adopt the approach to casualties -- our own, and others' -- that we took in World War Two. That was right then, and I suppose it could be right in some horrific future situation, but I'd far rather avoid that situation.